Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Chris Brenner and Manuel Pastor for a reading and signing of their new book Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future—a clarion call for justice in the quest for clean energy.

“Charging Forward brilliantly uses the Valley to illustrate what’s at stake as we move to a clean energy world. Clear-eyed that we cannot change the way we deliver power until we change who wields power, Benner and Pastor offer both hard-headed analysis and hope for a just future.” —Van Jones

Chris Benner is the director of the Institute for Social Transformation and the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also the Dorothy E. Everett Chair in Global Information and Social Entrepreneurship, and a professor of environmental studies and sociology. He has co-authored five books with Manuel Pastor, including Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn From America’s Metro Areas, and Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Manuel Pastor is the director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California where he is also a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity and the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change. He has co-authored five books with Chris Benner, including Equity, Growth and Community: What the Nation Can Learn From America’s Metro Areas, Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter, and Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future (The New Press). Pastor is also the author of State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future (The New Press). He lives in Los Angeles.

This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Social Transformation at UC Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.